SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

In his fifth story collection, Bausch (In The Night Season, 1998, etc.) delightfully proves himself the chronicler of faults—not wrongs, but the shy, ambiguous, and sometimes disastrous ways we don’y quite get each other. This strong gathering (many of the peices were published earlier in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Esquire, and elsewhere) limns characters who are usually certain there is a different, often better person within themselves trying to emerge through the obstacles of conversation, idle chatter, TV’s white noise. A brush with violence (a schoolbus accident in “Valor”; a traffic jam shooting in “Two Altercations”) is usually required to reveal the longings of this self, concealed behind habit, routine, and drab domestic fatigue. “Valor” shows a man mired in a slowly decaying marriage who acquires new vigor by saving the lives of children; he gains a vision of himself he can admire, but his wife is indifferent to it. The dislocations here are often psychological. In “Riches,” a lottery winner’s sudden wealth entraps him in a new identity that gives him a way to be himself. “Nobody in Hollywood,” a story about the triumph of longing over truth, a young man’s wife is profoundly changed by a pair of encounters with a woman whose cryptic personality lures away his brother and his own wife. From such inflicted cleavings, guilt, expectation, and insecurity waft up like a gas, and Bausch masterfully evokes their acrid residue, often with just a few phrases. Nobody has anybody else straight here—or, put differently in “Someone to Watch Over Me,” an older man can’t see his youthful wife as she sees herself and vice versa, which makes the bright spangle of happiness a capricious, happenstance joy. Short fiction is widely regarded as Bausch’s strongest genre, and this engaging collection can only fortify that impression.